


1,893.2 Miles

by energyintotomatoes



Category: New Girl (TV 2011)
Genre: Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fantasizing, Feelings Realization, For Adults Only, Inner Dialogue, Light Dom/sub, Love, Mild Kink, POV Alternating, Pining, Romantic Angst, Semi-Public Sex, Sex, Smut, Sometimes the Way to A Girl’s Heart Is Fixing Her Glasses, Story within a Story, The Pepperwood Chronicles, The Shed Scene
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:15:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29707368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/energyintotomatoes/pseuds/energyintotomatoes
Summary: As he’s fooling around on his laptop and eating leftover takeout, he Googles the distance between New Orleans and Los Angeles. He tells himself that it’s just a random thing he’s curious about, or that he’s looking this up because he misses Winston and Schmidt and Jess, the three of them, all equally.(Nick Miller is shit at lying to other people. He’s pretty good at lying to himself.)Nick is in New Orleans, in a relationship with Reagan, and in denial about his intense and lingering feelings for Jess—until a series of events happens that he can’t ignore. Canon-adjacent and then divergent. To borrow a description from Ol' Nick Miller, things get “disgustingly sexual.” Set after the S5 finale.
Relationships: Jessica Day & Nick Miller, Jessica Day/Julius Pepperwood, Jessica Day/Nick Miller, Jessica Night/Julius Pepperwood, Reagan Lucas/Nick Miller
Comments: 50
Kudos: 56





	1. Nick

**Author's Note:**

> An important thing to mention: The dom/sub dynamic touched on here in Nick and Jess’s sexcapades is only cool between consenting adults who trust each other and are both super into it, as these two characters very much are in my personal mind-canon. (Have you _seen_ [the look between them](https://energy-into-tomatoes-new-girl.tumblr.com/post/644140419538632704/stumbled-across-this-photo-and-im-pretty-sure-i) in this picture?)

As Nick Miller’s flight from Los Angeles to New Orleans takes off, he’s primarily thinking about three things: Time zones ( _Who invented them? Why? Can that person’s motives really be trusted?_ ), which foods he’s most excited to try when he arrives (gumbo and beignets, which he 100-percent believes are pronounced _ben-gays_ ) _,_ and how, exactly, Jessica Day convinced Reagan Lucas that he was a chance worth taking.

He was _sure,_ the day of Cece and Schmidt’s wedding, that Reagan was gonna realize she’d made a huge mistake by flying there to join him: He’s a bartender and wanna-be writer who almost exclusively wears flip-flops and henleys and insists that the latter were named after the guy in the Eagles! She’s a high-powered sales superstar who rocks pencil skirts and four-inch heels and can rattle off a clear, effective executive summary of the Supreme Court’s latest ruling involving Big Pharma in seconds!

Yet that night, his dynamo of an ex-girlfriend, in classic _Jessica-Day-makes-everything-OK_ fashion, somehow both persuaded Reagan to invite Nick to New Orleans for the summer with her, and encouraged him to believe in himself enough to say yes.

So here he is, 30,000 feet in the air, a new chapter about to begin. He is _doing_ this thing. He bought a new laptop, and while he’s down in New Orleans with Reagan, he’s gonna go from wanna-be writer to _actual_ writer. (The saga of Julius Pepperwood, P.I., ex-cop, ex-marine, is calling to Ol’ Nick Miller, and he’s gonna answer.)

He will step up his game, sharpen his vibe — maybe channel Jess’s ex, Russell, that elegant and sophisticated bastard.

He’s gonna prove to Reagan that whatever Jess said, she was right.

***

When he lands in New Orleans, Reagan has sent a fancy company car to pick him up and take him to their AirBnB. There are little bottles of water in the cupholders for him. He kind of feels like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” ( _You know who has some complicated and long-winded thoughts on that movie?,_ he muses to himself: _Jessica Day. Schmidt, too, weirdly. I should text them—_ )

He stops himself: He’s in New Orleans now, with Reagan. He’s gotta break his habit of thinking about and texting his roommates all the time and start focusing on what’s happening here and now.

_Look sharp, Miller_ , he tells himself.

He brings his suitcase up to their apartment and lets himself in using the code Reagan texted him. It’s a gorgeous one-bedroom, bright and sunny. That night, when Reagan gets home from work, he has flowers on the table waiting for her. They make out on the couch and then fuck in the bedroom. Her lipstick, somehow, stays perfectly, precisely on.

***

Very quickly, Nick learns that you can share a 500-square-foot apartment with someone else while spending very little actual time with them.

Reagan wasn’t around much back when she was subletting Jess’s room in the loft. He thought things would be different now, but most nights, they don’t even eat dinner together. It makes sense, though: She has on-the-company meals with local reps or with doctors she’s trying to bring into the fold at least three nights a week. And she’s a regular at evening networking events where they serve what she describes as “heavy hors d oeuvres,” a concept that’s new to him; he latches onto it and successfully makes her laugh (“Like, how heavy are we talking here, Reagan?”).

One night, one really good night, she brings him home a bacon-wrapped fig in her purse (" _This_ is how heavy we're talking"). They laugh, and then they’re kissing, and then they fuck in the bathroom, just for the hell of it, and he feels like this thing they're trying is really working.

Other times, though, he's not quite sure where he stands. He'll propose that they do something together (he's really trying to _do_ stuff! Grown-up stuff! Like, go to a museum, or a bourbon distillery, or to _brunch_!), and she'll say yes occasionally, but beyond work, her life is already pretty packed without him. She has a full agenda of things that can't be cancelled — sessions with her personal trainer, drinks with the girls, nail or hair appointments, massages, eyebrow waxings — so Nick often finds himself doing grown-up stuff alone.

( _Guys, I went to the New Orleans Mint today, and I think I finally understand money!_ , he almosts texts Jess and Schmidt and Winston on the first Saturday of his trip. He holds off, both to maintain some boundaries, and so that he won't have to explain, if asked, that he was there by himself.)

***

Sometimes, Nick finds himself going through a Reagan-related inventory.

She’s a real gem of a lady: smart, confident, sometimes a little mean. Insanely beautiful, too — so cover-of-Playboy-level hot that teenage Nick Miller would _never_ have believed his 30-something self would be in a relationship with her. Reagan’s a go-getter, she’s tough and determined and disciplined, and she’s _good_ for him! Case in point: he never went for walks, let alone _runs_ , until Jess somehow helped make this whole Reagan-and-Nick-in-New-Orleans thing happen.

In the three weeks since he and Reagan arrived, he’s gone running almost every day, pounding along the greenway connecting the French Quarter to City Park or the river paths near the aquarium. It feels weirdly good to just _not think_ for a while, for reasons he chooses not to explore, and for the first time in his life, to sweat consistently for a reason other than being nervous. He’s gotten leaner, lost some of the “little bubble belly” Jess once told him she loved.

He’s writing more than he ever has, too, even back in his Walking Dead fanfic phase. It’s great: He’s churning out pages and pages of Pepperwood every day — he’s found a bar where he likes to write, and a spot along the river, and the words just kind of flow out of him.

He’s a new, improved Nick Miller, he tells himself, and it’s all thanks to Reagan.

So when that small voice of doubt creeps in — asking why it sounds like he’s trying to _convince_ himself of something; wondering why they’re spending so little actual time together; urging him to admit that something is maybe missing here — he ignores it and moves along.

***

One month after Nick’s arrival in New Orleans, he gets up the courage to share what he’s written so far with Reagan.

He asks her, a little shyly, if she’d like to take a look at what he’s calling “The Pepperwood Chronicles.”

Her reaction isn’t what he had let himself hope for.

“Nick, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m excited for you, but fiction isn’t really my thing. I haven’t been sure how to tell you this, but it actually kind of puts me to sleep. Even the award-winning stuff that people say is really good.”

He plays it off like it’s no big thing, insisting what he’s written probably isn’t in good enough shape for anyone to read yet anyway, changing the subject, saying, “C’mere, let me give ya a backrub instead.”

(As he massages Reagan’s shoulders, he’s suddenly thinking back to that adult ed writing class Jess taught — her firm belief that even total weirdos had real potential; her stubborn optimism that every story mattered.)

***

Five weeks into his and Reagan’s time in New Orleans, he’s sitting in their apartment while Reagan is at a pharma networking night. It’s been a productive day — he wrote an entire, really solid Pepperwood chapter, one that really zips. It’s a chase scene involving a fan boat, a con-man who goes by Alligator, and an _actual_ alligator. Now, though, he’s feeling pretty bored. After years living in a loft with either three or four other roommates, he hasn’t yet gotten used to the quiet of sharing an apartment with just one other person who’s barely ever there. Refrigerators _hum,_ he’s realized, and clocks _tick_ , and there are all these other small sounds you only ever really hear when you’re alone.

He switches on the TV, a real nice flat-screen, and watches a baseball game as he drinks a beer or three or five.

At some point later on, as he’s fooling around on his laptop and eating leftover takeout from the night before, he Googles the distance between New Orleans and Los Angeles. He tells himself that it’s just a random thing he’s curious about, or that he’s looking this up because he misses Winston and Schmidt and Jess, the three of them, all equally.

(Nick Miller is shit at lying to other people. He’s pretty good at lying to himself.)

***

In his sixth week in New Orleans, while Reagan is at work, Nick falls asleep on the couch and has a dream.

They’re somewhere that isn’t the loft but also isn’t _not_ the loft. Jess’s black-brown hair is shiny and loose around her bare white shoulders. Her zig-zag green-and-white dress is on the floor.

With one hand, he’s pinning her wrists above her head against the wall, the way they discovered together one August night that she loved him to.

With his other hand, he’s working her soaked pussy as he stares into her eyes and she stares right back at him, biting her red lips, squirming like a live-wire, fucking _begging_ him — _please, Nick, please_ — not to stop.

He does. He stills his fingers and thumb just when he can tell she’s about to come, hard, all over his hand.

“Did Ryan make you feel this good?” he growls into her ear.

Her mouth opens into a red, fuckable _O_ of surprise and then excitement, and the flush on her cheeks deepens.

“No,” she gasps, “ _fuck_ , _no_ ,” and he starts to move his fingers again, agonizingly slowly at first.

“Did Russell know your cunt like I do?” he breathes into the alabaster curve of her ear as he picks up the pace and she starts to make those delicious, desperate sounds that mean she’s just about there. “Did Fancyman— ” (they break character and smile together for an eighth of a second at his use of the nickname; then he’s right back at it, serious and intense, curling two fingers up inside her and twisting his hand so that his palm is cupping her cunt) — “did he make your pussy this fucking wet?”

“ _No_ , _he didn’t, no, fuck no, Nick, please,_ ” Jess moans, and it’s so damn hot that he has to cover her mouth with his, fast and hard, for just a second...

...before going back to her ear and _biting down_ in the way and the place he knows sets her on fucking _fire_.

As her warmth pulses around his fingers, he presses his thumb against her swollen clit and grits out:

“ _Did you come this fucking hard for Sam_?”

She seizes around him as she orgasms, moaning, “ _No, Nick, only for you. Always for you._ ”

***

He wakes up with a start; a truck is outside, honking. After a few seconds of confusion, he remembers where, and at what moment in the arc of his life, he really is.

_Jesus._

He feels multiple, competing levels of shame.

He shouldn’t be having sex dreams about Jess _,_ _period_ , let alone while he’s dating someone else. _Especially_ when that someone else is Reagan, who is beautiful and amazing and far, far too good for him in every conceivable way, and who only took a chance on him after Jess herself encouraged her to.

But also: Sleeping Nick — what a possessive, insecure, jealous ass. Actual Nick would _never_ have made Jess relive her sexual history with other men while he was fucking her!

(He pauses.)

Unless, in this hypothetical scenario, she _wanted_ him to, and had hinted that he should maybe surprise her and try it sometime, because she had a feeling it would do very, very good things to her in the between-the-legs region?

Which — and he’s grinning involuntarily now, without even being aware of it — here’s the thing: he wouldn’t put it past her.

Jessica Day was 100 percent in charge of the non-sex elements of their relationship. She was a real planner, that one. But in the bedroom, everything shifted: she wanted _him_ to be the dominant force. (Seven words of permission — stubborn, wildly hot and so very _Jess_ — first opened this door: “Just grab me, Miller. Just _take_ me.”)  
  
They picked a safe word and went to town. Discovering how her body responded when he took control in various ways became their giddy and thrilling mutual pursuit. (Some highly successful experiments: Ordering her to take off her clothes and then fucking her on the dining room table, her heels digging into his back so hard as she came that he thought she’d leave bruises. In the parking lot at her school one morning as he dropped her off, locking eyes with her as he slowly gathered her hair in his fist and then gave a sharp _tug_ that went straight to her clit. “ _Nick_ ,” she gasped that afternoon as he sucked at her cunt, “I spent the whole damn day thinking about what you were going to do to me when I got home.” Clamping his hand over her mouth — “ _Do not make a sound, Jess, I mean it” —_ as he took her hard and rough in the dimly-lit stockroom of the Griffin around closing time, her skirt hiked up around her waist; they were just feet from the six or seven customers who remained in the bar. She bit down on the flesh of his palm as she came.)

Getting to do this to her and with her filled him with wonder. Because Jessica Day contained multitudes, contradictions that he realized — that _they_ realized, together — weren’t actually contradictions at all. The same girl who maintained a well-stocked crafting caddy absolutely adored getting fucked hard while bent over it. She could start the day with a passionate and brilliant feminist monologue and end it on her knees in passionate and brilliant submission, his cock pulsing in her throat, his hands fisting in her hair, her pussy so astonishingly wet in arousal and anticipation — he’d forbidden her, with a certain wicked smile reserved for situations like these, from touching it — that when he finally ran his thumb over her dripping slit, he almost couldn’t believe it.

In short: Revving Jessica Day’s engine was a goddamn delight, and what she wanted was exactly what he wanted to give her.

He’s flashing back now to that time, several months into their relationship, when they were sitting in a small booth at an Italian restaurant in downtown L.A., arguing over whether pepperoni should be pronounced with four syllables or three (“It’s _pep-roh-nee_ , Day — rhymes with _jabroni_.” “Are you quoting Hulk Hogan to me, Miller?”). When he started fondly and somewhat absent-mindedly stroking the soft skin of her leg beneath the tablecloth, her thighs just _opened_ to him, like his touch was a key unlocking her, and suddenly everything went dim except the bright-flaring current of _desire desire desire_ between them. And so he fucking _went_ for it, her eyes flashing with pleasure behind her glasses and her breathing growing rapid and a little squeaky as he secretly got her off in the middle of a room full of people—

_Stop_ , that’s irrelevant, you asshole!, he tells himself, because he is with Reagan, and he and Jess are over — have _been_ over. For going on two years now! A ten-word short story: He had her; he let her down; he lost her. When they were together, they were electric — he could swear he saw through space and time when they were fucking, or even just kissing, sometimes even just _arguing_ — but that’s not the point.

He fucked up. They were too different. They’re just friends now.

And she is very much over him, romantic partner-wise — something that was made _extremely_ clear to him when she helped set in motion the series of events that led to Reagan asking him to come to New Orleans for the summer.

So here he is, in New Orleans with Reagan for the summer.

A situation in which, by nearly any conceivable measure, he is insanely lucky to find himself.

_Get it together, Miller, you fucking idiot,_ he tells himself, and for the time being, for the most part, he does.

Things like this Jess dream and his associated thought-and-memory pattern are just weird sexual and emotional breadcrumbs leading _away_ from something, he tells himself, not _towards_ anything. They are just remnants: little, inevitable aftershocks, signifying nothing other than the fact that something big and meaningful happened once and is now in the past. New and different meaningful things are happening now, he tells himself, and _they_ are what's real.

He tries to ignore the fact that as he thinks about his dream in an attempt to contextualize it and put it in its place, his cock is still throbbing.

***

That night, feeling guilty even though Sleeping Nick’s escapades aren’t within his conscious control, he sets a goal of being extra-attentive to Reagan. It’s crazy-hot and humid, even with the window-unit A.C. blasting in their place, and when she gets home, she marches straight into their room and changes into a tight white tank top — no bra — and athletic shorts that show off the slow curve and lean muscle of her ass. He keeps complimenting her, but she’s prickly (she responds with “I know,” rolling her eyes at him a little bit, when he tells her she looks like she could be starring in an action movie as the heroine who brings down the drug kingpin/demon robot/evil sex-trafficking mastermind). Then he surprises her with beignets he bought from the place down the street.

“What’s gotten into you?” she asks, a little bemused, as they eat together. He mumbles something evasive — he’s not trying to be dishonest, really, he isn’t; it’s just that if he tells her _I had a pretty damn intense sex dream about someone else and I’m sorry,_ he’s pretty sure she’s going to laugh at him. He changes the subject, asking her to tell him about her day.

“It was fine,” she says — her usual answer — but a hint of a grimace flits across her face.

“C’mon,” he says. “I can tell something’s wrong.”

She sighs. “I got passed over for a promotion that I really, really wanted,” she says. “They gave it to some fucker who just joined the company last year. He’s related to the VP of sales. Nepotism fucking sucks.”

His first reaction is surprise: She had never told him she was in the running for a promotion in the first place, or that she really, really wanted it, which maybe sits a little bit funny with him. They’re living together, at least for the summer: if they’re really in this together, shouldn’t they be sharing that kind of stuff with each other?

But he’ll bring that up later. For now, he’ll just be there for her.

“Well, they’re idiots,” he tells her, deadly serious. “A real sorry bunch of no-good clowns. Total garbage people.”

That earns him an earnest and genuine smile. It feels good to be able to comfort her — she doesn’t usually show him much vulnerability, or any at all, really — and soon they’re kissing, hints of powdered sugar on each of their lips.

They fuck then — Reagan is an amazing girl, she really is, and almost militarily precise and efficient as a lover. She likes to be the one in charge: she sucks his cock and then pushes him down on their bed, rolls a condom onto him, and climbs on top, her red oval fingernails shining as she rubs her clit and rides him until she comes. He flips her over then — it’s his turn, biting her nipples through the thin cotton of the tank top she’s still wearing, pounding into her and telling her how good she feels and how beautiful she is. He really, truly means it.

It’s a good night. Not that he’s counting or anything, but he only thinks about Jess maybe once.  
  
***

After Reagan gets home from work the next day, he tells her that he was kind of surprised she never told him she was in the running for a promotion.

“I care about ya. I want to be there for ya,” he says. “Help me do that by letting me know what’s going on.”

She gets defensive.

“ _God_ , Nick, reporting back to you on everything I’m doing at work every day just isn’t my style,” she says, flicking her hair behind her shoulders.

“C’mon, Reagan,” he responds. “You know that’s not what I’m asking for here.”

She sighs and then leans forward so that he’s looking down the deep V of her silk blouse.

“Nick,” she says, suddenly all sultry, placing one hand slowly and deliberately on his thigh, “do you really want a girl who’s interested in talking about her _feelings_ all the time?”

For reasons he won’t quite let himself identify, that question freezes something in him. He goes through the motions as he lets her take control, leading him back to the bedroom. What happens next feels objectively good, and they both get off, but his heart isn’t in it.

He never answers her question. She doesn’t seem to care.

***  
The next night, he’s alone. Reagan’s at a sales dinner, trying to convince a bunch of doctors that her company’s arthritis drug is the one they should be prescribing in ever-larger quantities. He cracks a lager and goes down an internet rabbit hole of movies filmed in Chicago, which leads him to an independent film called “Asymptotes,” which leads to him Googling “what the hell is an asymptote”?

The answer, according to some website called study.com, is “a value that you get closer and closer to, but never quite reach,” or “a horizontal, vertical, or slanted line that a graph approaches but never touches.” 

He can’t articulate why this strikes him as unbearably sad.

***

Two days later, on his afternoon run, it’s crazy-windy, so much so that he cuts his route short. Back in the apartment, as he’s showering, he’s still thinking about wind ( _How do birds deal with wind like that? How hard would wind need to be blowing to tip over a parked car? What_ is _wind, when you really think about it, anyway?)_.

That’s when he remembers a wind-adjacent story from his past, back when he and Jess were together. It was a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon a few weeks before Halloween. Jess was at work and he was relaxing on the couch for a few hours before his shift at the bar. His phone rang, and it was her, and he answered before the second ring: She almost never called during the schoolday (“Gotta focus on molding young minds, Miller!”), and he was terrified that something was wrong.

“Jess, is everything ok?”

“Nick! It’s so windy out today — I was outside with the class on the playground and my glasses blew right off my freaking _face_ and snapped in half on the ground!” she said, breathless and talking fast. “It was like I was in the tornado from _The Wizard of Oz_ or something! And that relentless bastard really, really wanted to destroy my favorite pair of glasses!”

“Wow, Jess, wow,” he said, grinning, relieved that she wasn’t hurt or in any serious trouble. “That’s a real crazy story.”

“I don’t have contacts here with me and I can’t see anything — could you grab my backup pair of glasses and bring them here? _Please_?”

Of course he did, grabbing them from her dresser and driving them over to her as quickly as he could. 

He took the broken pair back home with him and spent the rest of his afternoon fixing the snapped bridge with superglue and a vise, buffing down the excess glue on the mended portion with sandpaper, and then polishing the bridge and the rims to even out their shine as best he could.

It was a Nick Miller fix, not a fancy fix, but it worked pretty well. She got home half an hour before he had to leave for his shift. Maybe she was just humoring him, but when he surprised her with the mended glasses and she turned them around in her hand to inspect them, she exclaimed, “Nick! How did you _do_ this? They look as good as new!” and her delight, her _joy_ , felt like the realest and truest thing he’d ever encountered. She threw her arms around his shoulders and then _jumped_ : her wrapping her legs around his hips and pressing her smiling mouth against his, him moving his hands automatically beneath her ass to support her, their bodies slotted together like this configuration was the purpose for which they had both been made.

He remembers how good it felt to come through for her, to be able to help her see clearly.

***

It’s three or four days later, the New Orleans night swampy and inky-hot. Nick and Reagan were supposed to go out to dinner, but she cancels on him. A friend of hers from another sales firm is unexpectedly in town, she says, and wants to get together with her before flying out in the morning.

Nick tells Reagan it’s no problem, that she should go for it. He doesn’t think too hard about how, even though things are pretty weird between them right now, it’s maybe a little odd that she didn’t ask him to just come along, or that he doesn’t feel particularly disappointed that she didn’t, or that when she tells him he shouldn’t wait up for her, he’s not upset.

He makes himself an old-fashioned and decides he’ll use this time for writing. He’ll turn off the overheads and, in a cliched attempt to channel Hemingway or Cussler, light one of the kerosene lanterns that he found in the pantry of the AirBnB. Before too long, he’s typing furiously, not really thinking, just feeling, following the story where it’s taking him:

_By the time Pepperwood gets to the shed and throws open the door, it’s deserted, empty except for one wooden chair._

_“Damn it,” he yells, pounding the splintered wooden wall with his fist.  
  
Then, he takes a slow sniff: The smell of cigarette smoke, he realizes, is still lingering in the air. _

_If JFK really_ is _still alive, then Pepperwood has missed — maybe by minutes — what might have been his only chance to pin the bastard down and find out the truth about the Cuban missile crisis once and for all.  
  
It’s a crushing near-miss, the kind that makes a man want to shake his fist at the sky._

_But before Pepperwood can get lost in despair, he hears a noise. He whirls around quickly, on high alert, his hand moving to his gun._

_There, in the moonlight, stands Jessica Knight, his girl Friday. Small in stature but not in spunk, she’s clad in a short, blue-and-white gingham dress, like a super-sexy version of Dorothy, her legs bare and shimmering in the night air._

_His mouth falls open in surprise._

_“Knight,” he says, “What are you doing here?”_

_“I followed you,” she tells him. “I had to.”_

_She takes a step closer, her expression firm and resolute, with a hint of something else — is she maybe teasing him a little bit, too?_

_“I couldn’t let you go it alone,” she says._

_Then she’s brushing past him into the shed — he notices that her hair is tied half-up, half-down with a slim ribbon that’s the same color as her eyes — and in her bright, determined, methodical way, she’s sweeping the shed for clues. He already knows there are none to be found, but he can’t stop watching as she searches: the way she stubbornly insists there_ must _be something, what happens to her hemline when she reaches up to run her delicate fingers over a horizontal shelf on the shed’s far wall, how her mouth purses into a red bow as she concentrates._

_JFK be damned. Suddenly, the only matter Pepperwood wants to privately investigate is what turns Jessica Knight on._

_“Any luck?” he asks her. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, a slight smirk playing across his face, his voice rough and a little bit low._

_“Not yet,” she responds. “But I’m not giving up.”_

_She stares straight into his eyes and then bites her lower lip, like a challenge or a dare._

_He accepts._

_In two quick strides, he covers the space between them and spins her around, hooking one arm around her chest to hold her steady and pull her tight against him, and reaching down beneath her skirt with the other._

_“I told you not to come here tonight, Jessica,” he murmurs into her ear, his fingers dancing gently over the soft skin underneath her hemline. “You’ve been a very bad girl.”_

_He studies her reaction, wanting to make 100-percent sure before they go any further that he’s read her right._

_And oh, oh: The smile on her face — it’s a look of goddamn_ triumph _— tells him that he has._

***

And then he’s finishing himself off, insanely, feverishly aroused, pumping the length of his cock and imagining that what’s gripping it is Jess’s tight, sweet pussy, not his own stupid hand. When he explodes to the imaginary sound of her calling his name, he’s totally and completely unprepared. A thick rope of cum shoots onto his laptop screen, as if he’s a teenager doing this for the first time, not an adult man with years of experience self-completing.

But cleaning up is the least of his worries right now. He has crossed a line — not as Sleeping Nick, but as Actual Nick — that can’t be un-crossed. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do about it yet, but he knows he has to do _something_.

After he cleans up his mess, before he does anything else, he rewrites this part of his story. 

He briefly considers naming Pepperwood’s paramour Nixon or Roosevelt, in penance. Instead, he completely depersonalizes the shed scene, turning it into a charged encounter with a sexy stranger whom Pepperwood meets that night for the first time and then never sees again.

Because Jess is going to read this book. He realizes, in a rush of clarity, that he _can’t wait_ to share it with her; that he cares more about what she’ll think of his writing than anybody else.

_But Jess doesn’t want him to be anything but her friend._

So she can’t know that it was originally Jessica Knight with Pepperwood in the shed, that it was clearly their dynamic he was channeling in this scene — that if he’s being honest with himself for one actual goddamn minute, it’s been her, everywhere, every time, all along.

_Shit_.

That last part —

He can’t un-think it. 

He can’t deny it.

He buries his head in his hands.

_I am the stupidest of all the stupid boys._

*** 

That night, he tosses and turns, his slumber fitful but blessedly dreamless. When Reagan slips into bed next to him at 1-something, he pretends he’s sleeping soundly. Nick Miller has not always been great with timing, but even he realizes that 1 am is not the best time to blurt out to your girlfriend that you think you need to break up. 

***

That morning, once they’re both awake and dressed, Nick comes clean.

He tells Reagan that she’s an amazing woman, a great, top-shelf lady, and that he, by contrast, is a stupid, stupid idiot, one who has realized he is still very much in love with his ex.

Reagan purses her lips, taking this in, staring at him with an expression he can’t read. He thinks for a second that she might slap him or scream at him. He thinks he would deserve it.

Instead, she asks him a question.

“Who’s the girl?” she asks.

His throat is dry. He opens his mouth but can’t get the words out.

“Who’s the girl?” she asks again.

He swallows, finally says it out loud, makes it real: “It’s Jess.”

It’s like the floodgates have opened; he starts babbling like a fool: “But it’s not her fault, Reagan, it’s mine. She hasn’t done _anything_ — She actually has no idea — we haven’t even been in touch while I’ve been down here — she doesn’t know anything about this — I didn’t even realize this was how I felt until — “

“Nick, _stop_ ,” she snaps, sounding exhausted. “Honestly, just stop.”

He cringes. She notices and sighs, her voice softening.

“I’ve been thinking about breaking up with you for the past few weeks anyway,” she says. “I’ve been procrastinating by avoiding you. This has been fun, and I’m glad we tried it out, but it’s not working for me. I thought I might be, but at this point in my life, I’m just not ready for something serious, and I think you are.”

He feels a huge, giddy, glorious rush of relief.

“You know, I can’t say I’m totally surprised,” Reagan says, crossing her arms and tilting her head, thinking. “Jess is a cool chick. And I mean, she was the first person you told me about when you met me. Like, within 30 seconds. It was actually a little weird.”

He groans a little bit. How could the truth have been _this fucking obvious_ to everyone but himself?  
  
“Reagan, I’m sorry,“ he tells her. “You deserve so much better than me. Seriously _._ ” 

“I know,” she says, smiling a little.

***

Nick books a flight to LAX for the next day. On their Apartment 4D text chain, he lets his roommates know that he’s coming back from New Orleans a few weeks early.

After he hits send, the first person to respond is Jess — her trademark blend of eagerness, support and concern coming across loud and clear in just six words:

_Sounds good, Miller! Is everything ok?_

He smiles. 

_Yep. See ya soon, Day._

***

He has no idea what he’ll find when he walks through the door of the loft. For all he knows, Jess has started dating someone while he was in New Orleans, or hasn’t missed him at all, or at least hasn’t missed him in the same _holy shit_ way he’s missed her. 

She may be really, truly over him. He may have really, truly missed his chance. 

But in the hours since he allowed himself to start thinking about Jess again, he’s been replaying their conversation from the night of Schmidt and Cece’s wedding in his mind. He’s been turning it over and over like it’s a pebble or a coin in his hand, growing smoother and brighter as he worries it between his thumb and forefinger:

_“Jess, I don't know what you said to Reagan, but I want to say thank you, because she wants to go for it with me. I can't believe it. I mean, why does she want to be with me? You of all people know that I'm just the weird detour you take before you find the guy you want to be with. I basically just help women realize that they could do a lot better—“_  
  
_“Stop it, Nick! I'm tired of you being the only person who doesn't see how incredible you are!”_

What if that wasn’t just Jess being Jess — saying nice things because she sees the best in everybody, always, even in him?

What if she was trying to tell him something bigger and deeper and also more _specific_ , and he _missed_ it, like some absolute dummy, until right now?

He could be wrong. He often is. He’s _definitely_ late. He knows only one thing for sure: There is a chance, however small, so he has to try.

*** 

Before Nick gets on the plane, he debates calling Schmidt or Winston and trying to ferret out what Jess has been up to while he’s been gone. But he decides this conversation — all of it — has to be between just him and Jess, the old-fashioned way: in person. And that he is going to be honest with her and with himself, no matter what.

So once he’s 1,893.2 miles northwest, he’ll start whatever happens next by reading Jess the draft dedication of the book-in-progress she helped him write, even when she was half a continent away: 

_To Anthony Rizzo and the Chicago Cubs, for all we’ve been through._

_And to my friend Jessica Day, for the same thing._

Then he’ll tell her that “friend,” while technically true, isn’t really the word he wanted to use before her name, not at all, not one bit, no ma’am.

He’ll pray to the ghost of Walter Payton that somehow, by some miracle, when he tells Jess that he and Reagan are done — and that _Jess, I love you_ is the reason why — her face will break into a classi _c_ Jessica Day smile, goofy and gorgeous and forgiving. That it will only grow bigger when he tells her what he now knows: Any place anywhere, whether it’s New Orleans or Mars Landing or the town in Footloose or heaven itself, is just gonna be a sad, lonely wasteland if she’s not there with him.

Because she’s the most incredible person he’s ever known, and the kindest and smartest and sexiest, and if she’ll give him another chance, he’ll happily let her plan out every damn step of his life as long as it’s intertwined with hers.

He’ll tell her that he’s so, so sorry it took him this long to find his way back to her, to grow and change enough to make it possible. That if she’ll let him, he wants to laugh with her, take care of her, learn from her, earn the life-changing privilege of getting to make her come over and over again.

That he wants to be hers and hers alone.

That that’s exactly what he _has_ been, all along, the whole damn time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Original note:_ I’m a little ambivalent about this fic, as I kind of hate pitting Reagan and Jess against each other (and I _really_ hate the trope of Ambitious Working Woman Spends Too Much Time Working And Not Enough With Her Man — I hope this comes across more as Ambitious Working Woman Has Different Priorities Than Her Man & He’s Therefore Not Compatible With Her), but I wanted to explore a version of Nick’s New Orleans trip that brought him back to Jess. I feel like I’ve maybe treated Reagan more as a Help Nick Realize He Still Loves Jess plot device than as an actual person with actual feelings, and let Nick off a little too easy. But so, to a certain extent, did the show itself... anyway, I’m sorry, Reagan! ( _she says, apologizing to a fictional character, as one does... totally normal...)  
>  _
> 
> This may stay a one-shot, but I’m considering turning it into a three-parter, with a second chapter giving Jess’s POV throughout the weeks while Nick is in New Orleans and then a third exploring what happens when they reunite. If that’s something anyone might be interested to read, please let me know in the comments. Thank you again!  
>   
>  _Update:_ This is becoming a three-parter, thanks to all of your kind and encouranging comments. Thank you so much!


	2. Jess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jessica Day embarks on what she's calling her Summer of Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps. Things don't go exactly as she planned.

Every morning, when Jessica Day opens her own bedroom door, she’s greeted by Nick Miller’s closed one.

It’s been three days since he left for New Orleans with Reagan, which means it’s been seven since she started to realize that she was still in love with him, and six since he came to her at Cece and Schmidt’s wedding, questioning whether someone like Reagan could actually be into someone like him.

She almost kissed him right then and there after grabbing his lapels and telling him to stop doubting himself ( _why_ did he have to look so stupidly good in that tan suit?).

But she couldn’t do it.

 _He’s_ the one who makes big, sexy, surprise moves (such as: The Hallway Kiss That Divided Her Life Into Before-and-After; Sweeping Her Off Her Feet In The Elevator and Carrying Her To His Bed Like A Swashbuckling Sex-Pirate), not her.

So she kept her mouth off of his mouth, and she told him the truth — “Nick, I’m tired of you being the only one who doesn’t see how incredible you are!” — without telling him the _whole_ truth: That she wants him back.

Pretty desperately.

That when she was talking to Reagan about why she and Nick _didn’t_ work, she was thinking instead about all the ways they _did_.

Now, thanks in part to Jess’s boosting of Nick to Reagan, and then her boosting of Nick to _Nick,_ the two of them are living together in New Orleans for the summer, while Jess is lying boneless on the couch of the loft, staring at the ceiling, her limbs spread out as if she has paused in the middle of making a snow angel.

“I am the architect of my own nightmare,” she intones to an empty room.

Jess can make dramatic proclamations like that loudly and freely these days, because for the time being, she’s often the only person in Apartment 4D.  
  
Nick — well, Nick is in New Orleans with Reagan (says the ticker tape that runs across the bottom quadrant of her mind, CNN-style, during her every waking hour).  
  
Winston, since returning from pranking Cece and Schmidt by showing up on their honeymoon, has been spending his time pretty exclusively with Aly, either over at her apartment or sequestered with her in his bedroom. (Which is OK with Jess. They just recently said “I love you” and though she’s really, truly happy for them, their extreme lovey-doveyness would be tough to handle in large doses at this particular juncture.)

Speaking of extreme lovey-doveyness, Schmidt and Cece are on a two-week honeymoon in Cabo St. Lucas.

“You sure you’ll be OK, babe?” Cece asked Jess right before leaving. (Cece, who knew her secret without having to be told; who held her hand under the table as she watched Nick and Reagan dancing, feeling a sadness so sharp and bottomless she could barely breathe).

“Yes,” Jess insisted a little too brightly, shifting into her Tony the Tiger impression as she shooed the newlyweds out the front door: “I’ll be grrr-eat! You two lovebirds go off and have fun in the sun. Don’t you worry about ol’ Jess, ok?”

She kept the forced smile pasted on her face until the front door clicked shut.

***

As she lies on the couch, notices a pattern of faint cracks on the ceiling that looks kind of like a friendly dinosaur, and contemplates her next move, Jess realizes she owes Sam a debt of gratitude.

By simultaneously dumping her and forcing her to realize that she still loves Nick, he gave her cover: If she _wanted_ to, she could watch “Dirty Dancing” six or seven times daily and have Winston (and Schmidt, once he and Cece are back) think she’s just mourning the loss of her relationship with Sam, not pining over Nick.

She knows, though, that this situation calls for something different. This is about _Nick —_ friend, ex, roommate, man who insists Sting is an actual police officer _—_ who occupies important, confusing spaces in so many previously separate compartments of her heart and mind and life that she can’t just wallow. She needs to figure out what her feelings _mean_ and how the freaking heck she’s going to move forward without ruining their friendship and blowing up the delicate ecosystems of both Apartment 4D and her own heart.

 _Deep breaths, Day,_ she tells herself as panic creeps in, and then: _You’ve got three months to figure this out._

Jess makes a decision. She’s going to keep herself busy for a while; get some emotional distance from her Big Realization. Then, she’ll revisit this whole dilemma with clear eyes and come up with a logical, well-thought-out rundown of exactly what she’s going to do when Nick returns.

( _This is growth, right?_ she asks herself. _Recognizing that I don’t have to have every single thing figured out right this second_?)

She sits up.

This will be her Summer of Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps.

***

To set in motion phase one (which she has dubbed “Operation Keep Jess Occupied”), Jess signs up to teach summer school in her district four days a week. In pursuit of other time-consuming distractions, she, Jessica Day, regular earner of the title “Loft Klutz,” joins, of all things, a rock climbing gym.

She also picks up a course catalogue for the Los Angeles Center for Adult Education and is tempted to enroll in _Bees in Our Bonnet: Modern Beekeeping 101_.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to make our own honey?” she muses to Winston one morning, figuring she has a 50-50 shot of him thinking this idea is awesome versus him thinking it’s terrible. “We could totally put the hives on the roof.”

“Oh _hell_ no, Jess,” he says as he pours his coffee, looking at her like she’s crazy — which, okay, now she kind of sees it. But still, bees! They’re the best: so hard-working, so essential, so misunderstood.

She half-smiles, remembering a time when she was in Nick’s room trying to get him on board with some Greenpeace “Save the Bees” online fundraiser. (“ _Nick_ , they’re _dying_ , and it’s a real problem!”) He responded, “Sure, Jess, I believe ya,” but added that he had always been afraid a bee would fly into his ear and “secretly just start making honey in there” and he wouldn’t even realize it, “because honey looks and tastes very similar to earwax.” (“ _Ew_ , Nick, that’s disgusting!” “So are _bees_ , Jessica! I rest my case.”)

It was more foreplay than fighting (why was arguing with him over weird stuff so much _fun_?), each of them teasing the other in increasingly ridiculous ways, and then Nick slid a hand up under her skirt and growled “Jessica, enough about the damn bees” and she couldn’t really think any more, and he smiled at the dazed look on her face and then pressed his lips to her neck and went _bzzzzzzzz, bzzzzzzzz,_ _bzzzzzzz_ —

_Snap out of it, Day._

After a few deep breaths, she gets it together, mostly (she’s sitting at the table, and Winston is right there in the kitchen, and getting all hot and bothered over Nick Sex Memories right now is _not_ part of her plan). She resumes her perusal of the course catalog. Other summer classes of note include _Pick Me, Pick Me! Tips for Gathering Wild Herbs and Flowers_ ; _Basket Cases: Basket Weaving for Dummies_ ; _Let’s Clay Around: Pottery and Sculpting for Beginners_ ; and _It’s Hammer Time: Woodworking for Newbies_.

She enrolls in those last two, trying not to think about how hard Nick would be making her laugh by groaning at these course titles if he were here.

***

While she waits for summer school and her adult ed classes to begin, Jess has a new idea: She’ll try to talk herself out of loving Nick and wanting to be with him.

She starts writing a list in one of her pastel-hued moleskine notebooks, calling it **Reasons Why Nick Is Annoying and You Do Not Belong Together** :

_He thinks Mick Jagger’s name is McJagger (“like McDonald’s, Jess!”)._

_He “doesn’t trust” organic vegetables (“something’s just not right about ‘em, Jessica, and I’ll stand by that”)._

_He somehow, infuriatingly, calls Twitter “Tweeter” and tweets “twits,” as if he is 84, not 34._

_The freaking panic-moonwalking._

The problem is, instead of the extreme, love-killing irritation that part of her was hoping for, making this list results mostly in feelings of great fondness.

And Nick is so much more than these things alone: for each flaw she writes down, three to five things that are _very, very good_ about him keep surfacing in her brain.

Things like: The vein of deep, fundamental decency that runs beneath the superficial skin of his Matthau-esque grouchiness. (Watching him in action at the bar, she was always moved by the gruff kindness with which he handled lonely solo drinkers; he took care not to embarrass them even when he had to cut them off or take their keys.) The way that, whether it was before, during or after their romantic relationship, he was always there for her whenever she really needed him. (She’s wearing the glasses he surprised her by mending one day two Octobers ago. They’ve held together; she’s never replaced them.)

She thinks, for a few seconds, about the way Nick’s whole face softens when he smiles; how when he’s really concentrating (on his writing, on pouring a drink, on some quixotic quest to prove something to someone somewhere), he taps his tongue on the roof of his mouth and it makes his Adam’s apple bob ever so slightly.

And then — she can’t help it — she starts going on sexy tangents about, um… _other_ good things about Nick. For example: his hands (so big! so rough! so purposeful!) and what he did to her with them. Somehow, Nick Miller, the same man who believes wallets are for suckers, could turn something as simple as [removing a stray eyelash from her left cheek](https://mrsevanpeters.tumblr.com/post/642693650939248640/ive-never-wanted-to-be-zooey-deschanel-more-in-my) into a Full-Blown, Yup-This-Is-Happening Erotic Experience: telling her, “Jess, don’t move,” curving the rough fingers of one hand around the side of her neck while running his thumb along her jawline to tilt her face up towards his, and closing in with his other thumb and forefinger at just… the right… spot… to capture the offending eyelash, swiftly, perfectly, on the first try.

The first time he used this technique was after he had kissed her but before they had done anything else, sex-wise; she felt the crotch of her panties dampen instantly and thought for two dizzying seconds that her knees might actually buckle. She remembers wondering, _My God, if this is what happens when Nick helps me out with a rogue eyelash, what is it going to be like when he actually_ fucks _me?_

(She had surprised herself slightly by using that word — _fuck_ — in her inner monologue, instead of one of its more euphemistic cousins, and also by going with _when_ rather than _if._ But at the same time, something new-ish and bold and _sure_ in her knew that both of those word choices were exactly, deliciously right, and that in fact, she didn’t just want Nick Miller to _fuck_ her, but to fuck her _good_ and _hard_ and _strong._ Like, to bend her over a chair or the couch or push her up against the wall and _yank_ her panties to the side with his big hands and just _take_ her as she flushed and gasped, the wettest and most wanton that she had ever, ever been — _)_

 _Focus, Day, Focus_.

With a determined exhale, she adjusts her glasses and snaps herself out of what’s fast becoming a full-blown Sex Reverie About Nick, forcing herself to return to the originally intended exercise of Itemizing Why Nick Is The Worst and You Two Don’t Work.

She gets serious, and she comes closest to succeeding in breaking his spell over her with entries along these lines: _  
  
You and Nick broke up for a reason. You have a lot of differences. You view the world in divergent ways. _

Ultimately, though, even these don’t work — because while they’re true, they’re not the _whole_ truth. They’re not the only things that count. And he wasn’t the only one at fault.

She’s come to grasp that she could be a bit of a Judgmental Jessy — that her need to plan out every single step of their lives years in advance was a little bit unnecessary and a little bit suffocating.

She’d be different with him, now, more willing to meet in the middle.

She suspects he’d be right there in the middle with her: He’s clearly come to the conclusion that doing _some_ planning, and committing to _some_ future goals, isn’t a bad thing. He’s a part-owner of the bar now (with his own _office_! With a desk and a scheduling whiteboard and everything!); he’s getting serious about his writing; she feels so proud of him she thinks her heart might explode.

And there’s this: She’s realized now that for all the grief she gave him about not being good at sharing his feelings (something she _thought_ was one of their key differences), their pattern in reality told a different story.

 _He’s_ the one who said “I love you” first; who went out on a limb and admitted, even before it happened, that sex with her was something he’d thought a lot about; who said over and over again, while they were together, that he had wanted this for so long.

_(Please, please — might he still?)_

He backed it all up by confessing that he had fallen for her the moment she walked through the door of the loft in which she now sits, without him.

 _Hell_ — it dawns on her, painfully — even his opening up to her about his Reagan-related insecurities showed that he was far better at communicating his emotions than she ever gave him credit for.

 _Crap._ This hurts too much; she can feel the tears coming.

So she rereads her list and tries really, really hard to find an emotion other than sadness on which to focus.

She lands on indignation.

Because — those freaking differences. Guess what? She’s _glad_ they have them! (She’s getting _mad_ at this entry on her list now, _insulted_ by it, as if she didn’t just write it herself.) She and Nick are the push and the pull; the moon and the tides; two messy, complicated, stubborn people who are both more than the sum of their parts. Yeah, they would frustrate each other sometimes if they got back together, sure! But mainly, she thinks, they would challenge and complement each other in good and necessary ways, more confident this time in their love; more open to where it could take them.

She meant it when she told Nick he was incredible.

Unbidden, an element of the summer school lesson plan she was working on earlier that day pops into her brain: Venn diagrams. Jessica Day freaking _loves_ Venn diagrams. They’re one of her favorite things on God’s green earth. She sometimes makes them out of felt, just for the heck of it. She’s taught and explained them five million times. _So how did she not realize until right now that you can’t_ have _a Venn diagram if you have no differences?_ All you’re left with, then, is a single, deeply boring circle.

She _knows_ it, bone-deep: The places where she and Nick overlap are enough.

She wraps up her list-making with one line of summation, emphatic and in all-caps:  
_  
I LOVE HIM. I DO. (I AM SCREWED.)_

***

Two weeks into Jess’s Summer of Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps, summer school has started. So have her sculpting and woodworking classes. She gets a whole routine going, throwing herself into it all with a fervor that’s maybe a little manic, getting some weird looks from her classmates over how intensely she’s working her clay.

The weekdays are kind of OK, thanks to how tightly she’s scheduled herself.

Weekends, when her agenda is much more open, are a whole different ballgame.

Starting from the moment she opens her eyes on Saturday morning, it’s nearly impossible to do anything other than wonder, over and over: _What are Nick and Reagan doing right now?_

From there, it’s a short and brutal leap to: _Is it each other?_

And _God_. She’s been holding it together pretty darn well, she thinks. But this— this is maybe the hardest part of all to face: how _very, very good_ sex with Nick was.

How if she’s being honest with herself, no one else, before or since, has come even remotely close.

She can trace it all back to the way she sometimes caught him looking at her after she moved in — [his gaze dark and intense and _possessive_](https://energy-into-tomatoes-new-girl.tumblr.com/post/644140419538632704/stumbled-across-this-photo-and-im-pretty-sure-i) in a way that made her suddenly, acutely aware of the feeling of her cotton panties rubbing against her folds as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

Saying he was undressing her with his eyes wouldn’t be quite right. It was more than that: It was a look that said, _I know who you really are and what you really want — that you are rainbows and sunshine and boundless compassion, yes, but also other, hidden things, and that you’re secretly hoping you’ll be found out._

Sometimes he’d look away, but other times he _wouldn’t_ — holding her gaze with his like some sort of sexy, dangerous tractor beam as he raised a bottle of beer to his lips, or crossed his arms over his chest, or slid a plate of nachos made with Kraft singles across the counter to her. She hadn’t thought of Nick Miller as a multitasker in many other respects, but the way he could maintain unbroken eye contact with her while doing _these_ things made her think he might be good at doing, um… many, many _other_ things while his eyes stayed locked on hers.

He looked at her in other ways, too — with fondness (“Jess, ya didn’t have to knit a hat for me because ‘it’s cold out for LA right now and you’re worried my brain will freeze,’ but it’s real nice of ya”), disbelief (“You recorded the National Spelling Bee over the Bears game? _Why_ , Jessica? _Why_?”), and sometimes, something like awe (“Those kids are really lucky you’re teaching them, Jess,” after she pulled an all-nighter to develop a lesson plan that did justice to _Island of the Blue Dolphins_ ).

But _that_ look had a unique impact on her, and it popped up at weird times. Just weeks after she moved into the loft (and a day after she accidentally walked in on Nick as he danced naked in his room, trying to psych himself up before a date), she tried to get him to share his emotions about that awkward moment by passing him her trusty feelings stick.

Something in her went _hot_ when he [leaned in close to her, plucked it from her hands, and _snapped_ it clean in half](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEh9z48RClk) — all while staring straight into her eyes, with annoyance, yes, but also something else.

Well, _that’s_ a messed-up reaction, Day, she told herself as she shifted in her seat, secretly and undeniably aroused.

In a rare move for Jessica Day, she decided at the time not to overthink her body’s response — to just chalk it up to being in a weird place following Spencer’s betrayal.

But if she’s being honest with herself, she had replayed that moment — Nick’s intense gaze, the flexing of his forearms, the sound of the _snap_ — in her mind that night as she squeezed her legs together around her hand.

That’s right around when her sexy-time fantasies started changing.

Thanks to what she now realizes was a combination of denial and stubbornness, they wouldn’t feature Nick unless she had had a lot of pink wine and let herself slip. ( _He’s just my roommate and friend who sometimes makes me laugh, and sometime pisses me off, and sometimes does really nice things for me, and sometimes gives me sexy looks that he’s probably not even aware he’s giving! He probably looks the same way at the garbageman and the delivery guy!_ , she’d tell herself.)

But these new fantasies always involved a very different power dynamic than she had ever placed her imaginary self in before: a man holding her down as he pounds into her hard and whispers obscene things in her ear. A man pinning her wrists to the wall above her head with one hand, casually inspecting the wetness between her legs with the other, as she squirms and moans. A man with an unblinking stare beckoning her to him from across a crowded room and telling her to get on her knees, right there, in front of everyone.

Opening her mouth and obeying.

It was all so much _dirtier_ than anything she had ever previously fantasized about, and it made her feel deliriously, insanely sexy. Also, at first, confused and a little guilty: _How could I, Jessica Day — lifelong feminist who dressed as Emmeline Pankhurst for 3rd-grade Halloween! Co-founder of my high school’s gender equality society! Person who is_ nice _and_ good _! Woman who is known for liking to plan and control and meddle in_ everything! _— also be someone who maybe wants a guy to full-on take control of me in bed? Am I letting down my hardy Oregonian foremothers? Will everyone at the Nothin’ But Knit yarn store somehow sense that I am impure and expel me from their ranks? Oh my God, can I still be a person who unironically loves everything about Christmas if I’m also someone who’s… maybe actually kind of kinky?_

Those questions went unresolved for a while.

She got her first real-life taste of not-totally-vanilla sex with Sam, who was tall and handsome and liked to fuck her pretty rough; who gave her what, until then, was the best sex of her life.

But _oh_ , then came Nick.

Nick, her friend, her roommate, who grabbed her and kissed her in the hallway one night with such forceful, consuming heat that she thought her pink robe would freaking _disintegrate_ , as Sam slept, eight feet away and oblivious, in her bed.

Nick, who somehow knew exactly what she wanted even before _she_ did. Who made her come harder than anyone else had, ever _;_ who made her feel _known_ and adored in ways both sexy and profound despite the fact that he also duct-tapes his sandals rather than buying new ones; who, it turned out, really _could_ do filthy and wonderful things to her without ever breaking eye contact.

Nick, who is in New Orleans and is probably doing filthy and wonderful things to Reagan without breaking eye contact right now.

Jess eyes the large skein of yarn on the floor by her window, but knitting to release her frustration is not gonna cut it this time.

Slamming the door of the loft behind her, she heads to the gym to go climb some fake rocks. For two glorious hours, she sweats and doesn’t think at all, moving from handhold to handhold and foothold to foothold, trying not to lose her grip.

***

The next week, Cece and Schmidt are back, which is great; really, it is. But it’s also a little hard. Because they’re so _happy_ , and it’s really beautiful, and Jess realizes she doesn’t want to bring Cece down by filling up her post-honeymoon reentry period with non-stop chatter about how miserable she is without Nick.

( _This is growth, too, I think?,_ she asks-slash-tells herself.)

That’s not to say there isn’t _some_ discussion of her dilemma.

After Cece and Schmidt have taken her and Winston and Aly through a slide show of photos from their honeymoon, set to music, that Schmidt made on the plane ride back (“That’s us with a freakin’ dolphin! And that’s us eating _conch_ with pineapple chu-ten-y at the finest restaurant in Cabo! And that’s— oh, whoops, Cecelia, did I… _accidentally” —_ he winks— “include a private shot in there?”), Jess goes to her room for the night.

A few minutes later, Cece knocks at the door and comes in and asks her how she’s doing.

Jess is honest — “this is freaking _hard_ , man” — and fills her in on what she’s been up to; how even signing up for and doing All The Things hasn’t stopped her from thinking about Nick nearly nonstop; how she’s more sure than ever now that yup, she really, really loves him.

She sighs: “Why is it that sometimes we don’t realize the most obvious things until it’s too late?”

“Jess,” Cece says gently, “How do you know it’s too late?”

“I just— he’s with _Reagan_ , and she’s amazing, and I’m sure he’s really happy with her, and I practically _pushed_ them into each other’s arms like a freaking _idiot_ , so I can’t _do_ anything about it— “

Cece makes a noise like a mother soothing a child — _hushhhh_ — and just hugs her.

It’s really, really nice, and it helps.

After Cece leaves, Jess admits to herself that every time there’s a knock at her door, some cruelly, irrationally hopeful part of herself says, _Maybe that’s Nick_.

***

One month into Jess’s Summer of Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps, the inevitable happens: She has a sex dream about Nick.

A _very good_ sex dream about Nick.

She’s walking into The Griffin on a crisp fall night, wearing heels instead of her usual flats. Her tight red dress resembles the one she wore to a fancy restaurant with Nick back before he kissed her, when he was being her fluffer for Sam in more ways than either of them consciously knew.

Nick is behind the bar pouring drinks, the sleeves of his green-and-blue-plaid flannel rolled up, his forearms bare.

He sees her approaching and looks her up and down. Then he locks eyes with her and, without breaking his gaze, _snaps_ the bar towel up over his shoulder.

Her breath hitches in her throat.

She slips onto a barstool close to him, the clingy red material of her dress barely covering her ass when she crosses her legs.

“Hey there, barkeep,” she says in an old-timey voice. “What’cha got on tap?”

Nick doesn’t answer; he’s just giving her _that look_ , a smirk playing at the corners of his skilled mouth.

She reaches down and pulls out her purse, making a show of placing it on the bar so he can see that it’s decorated with glitter and gemstones.

The smirk becomes a full-on smile, for just a second, and then that glint she knows so well enters his eyes.

“Why, Jessica Day,” he says, his voice low and rough and slightly bemused, his eyes never leaving hers. “Did you come in here tonight looking to get fucked?”

The way her body responds — her clit throbbing; the folds of her pussy saturated in seconds — is so overwhelming that she almost throws her head back and moans right then and there on the bar stool.

He knows exactly what he’s doing to her. Slowly, deliberately, he rests his elbows on either side of her and leans in towards her over the bar, close enough that she can smell the Irish Spring soap he showers with.

“Show me how wet you are right now, Jessica,” he says, his voice an impossibly hot combination of gravel and scotch.

Her eyes — already wide in normal circumstances — flash even moreso behind her glasses.  
  
“Right here?” she squeaks out, her voice breathy, fluttering. “ _How_?”

“You know,” he says evenly, dropping his eyes down to her lap and then up again.

She’s so slick with arousal she’s afraid she’s going to slide right off the damn bar stool.

Her cheeks and chest flushed, she looks around and furtively brings one hand down to her hemline, as if she’s adjusting her ridiculously short skirt.

Instead, she quickly swipes her pointer and index fingers against her bare, wet slit.

When she brings her hand up to show Nick, those two fingers glisten under the bar lighting.

The self-satisfied-to-the-point-of-smugness look on his face would be infuriating if it weren’t also so fucking hot.

“Good girl, Jess,” he says, and then, “Don’t move, you hear me?”

She nods, twice, not sure what’s going to happen next but so turned on that she’s no longer really capable of speech.

She hears Nick telling the other guy who’s working tonight to cover him. And then he’s walking out from behind the bar around to where she’s sitting, brushing up behind her, putting a hand on her thigh, and bringing his mouth to her ear.

“Jessica Day,” he says, “My office. _Now_.”

Her heart pounding, the slickness at the top of her thighs rubbing together, two of her fingers still wet with her own arousal, she pushes herself off the barstool. She feels Nick’s arm curve around her waist — a moment of sweet reassurance — _and then he moves his hand straight down to cup her ass through her skirt and keeps it there as he steers her towards his office._

Her mouth opens in an O of surprise: Now, every single person in that bar who sees them will know exactly what’s going to happen once he gets her behind that door: he’s maneuvering her in there to fuck her so good and hard she might have trouble walking tomorrow morning, her every step reminding her that she’s _his_.

Even before the door fully closes behind them, his mouth is on her mouth and he is pressing her up against the wall and sliding two fingers, then three, inside her — “ _Fuck_ , Jess” — as she lets out all the moans she’s been biting back.

In some Pavlovian way, she finds the jingle of his belt to be highly erotic; when she hears it now, she reaches blindly for his cock, but he grabs her wrist and then twists her around and maneuvers her across the room — this is happening on _his_ terms.

Which — who is she kidding? — is exactly what she wants.

And then he’s bending her over his desk, his jeans down around his ankles, her dress hiked up around her waist, the feeling of his cock entering her and filling her and stretching her out better than anything else she’s experienced, ever, in her entire life.

“I missed you so much, Nick,“ she gasps.

Before Dream Nick can respond, Jess is jolted awake — it’s early morning; there’s construction starting up on the street below.

But _oh, oh_ , she doesn’t want this to be over.

So she’s finishing herself off underneath what Nick would call her “pajama outfit,” insanely, feverishly aroused, imagining that what’s inside of her right now is his thick and satisfying cock, not the fingers of her own small hand.

As she comes, she lets herself call out his name, just once.

She stays in that liminal space between the receding of her dream, the aftermath of her orgasm, and fully waking up for as long as she can.

***

There was a time when having and _loving_ a dream like that, and the fact that she would probably want to try some version of it with Nick in reality, would have freaked Jessica Day out.

That changed back when she and Nick were together, for reasons that all came together for her one particular September morning.

She was riding a pretty glorious Sex High at the time. The previous night, Nick had gotten her off with his hand under the table while they were out to dinner, and then they had pulled the car over on the way home because sucking his dick couldn’t wait even 10 minutes longer (Jessica Day had never been much of a blow job gal before Nick Miller, so why did she freaking _love_ how having his cock down her throat made her feel?), and once they got home she graded a bunch of her students’ papers and then worked on knitting a hat for Sadie’s baby while Nick gave her what he insisted was somehow a “Chicago-style” foot massage (“watch the master work, Day”), and then that morning he fucked her hard against the wall of the shower with his hand over her mouth and made her come twice.

Because he’s Nick, he made her eggs for breakfast and called them “the Nick Miller special.” Because she’s Jess, the general concept of eggs made her think of and recount a story she read recently about two male penguins who adopted an abandoned egg and then brought the baby chick up together (“Nick, isn’t that just _beautiful_?”). She told him what she was most excited to teach that day (a lesson about _Bridge to Terabithia_ she'd been working on for a while; she wants the kids to grapple with their emotions honestly and not be afraid to _feel_ ), and he said she’s going to crush it. He told her they’re trying out a new, iPad-based point-of-sale system at the bar, and he’s kinda nervous that it’s gonna make the place feel “too fancy” and “too upscale”; she told him to give it a chance, and that if it doesn’t feel right she’s sure he’ll figure something out.

And then, when she was just about to walk out the door, he grabbed her and gave her one of those consuming and incendiary Nick Miller kisses, as if they didn’t just fuck an hour ago, as if she was leaving for a week or a month or a summer rather than just a schoolday.

Right there in the hallway, while Winston and Schmidt were in the kitchen arguing over whether toast is better with or without the crusts cut off, he reached underneath her skirt and pressed his palm against her pantyhose-covered mound.

With his other hand, he gathered her hair in his fist and _tugged,_ once, sharply.

“See ya tonight, Day,” he said in his Sex Nick voice, grinning at her sharp intake of breath, then releasing her.  
  
And then, in his normal voice, as she was going out the door: "And Jess, good luck with the _Bridge to Terabithia_ lesson. You're gonna open up their little hearts, I know it."

As she drove to school, she hummed happily. Part of her was thinking about how great it felt to just _not have to think_ when it comes to sex _;_ how exhilarating and fucking _hot_ it was for Nick to be in charge of that realm of their relationship; how good it felt to trust him enough to _let_ him. Another part of her was still thinking about how sweet that penguin family’s story was, and how humanity really needed to get its shit together about global warming for _many_ reasons, including penguins. Then her mind wandered to that day’s upcoming _Bridge to Terabithia_ discussion, and then the feminist pioneers module she’d be teaching the next week and how pumped she was to play the “Jeopardy: Powerful Women of History & the Present” game she had created for the kids (she sewed a giant cloth Jeopardy board with pockets for each answer, the dollar amounts written in glitter). And then a small pothole jarred the car and she felt the most delicious flash of soreness in her well-used pussy, and she was thinking again about what Nick did to her last night and that morning, and how much she loved it, and what he might have in mind for her tonight, and how she hoped it would involve her on her knees with her hands tied behind her back.

As she was waiting at a red light, it hit her: _Oh my God. All of these parts of me are_ me _, and all of them are OK._

She was so excited _(Is this what they call a Eureka moment?)_ that she couldn’t help but _honk_ her car horn and yell “Yes!”

She immediately apologized through the car window to an old lady she’d startled on the sidewalk, and then continued her train of joyful thought:

 _Oh my God, it’s freaking_ true _! Heck_ yes _, I can be someone who has both a lifetime membership to the Yarn Enthusiasts of America_ and _a safeword! An enthusiast of baby animals and also, maybe, some light bondage! A control-freak of sorts outside the bedroom who wants to be bossed around inside it! A firm believer in smashing the patriarchy who is also really, really into it when her boyfriend holds her down and fucks her! Because maybe part of being a feminist is being exactly who you really are without apology, going after what you really want and not judging yourself for your desires as long as they’re safe, sane and consensual! (Dudes sure don’t judge themselves for theirs!)_

She is Jessica Day. She is not just one thing. She is _all_ of these things. And that’s not only OK, but actually kind of awesome.

 _That look._ Nick Miller, she realized, had known so all along.

At school that day, she taught the kids about chemical reactions — combustion, synthesis, atoms being rearranged.

***

Five weeks after Nick left Los Angeles, Jess has a really tough day.

In the morning, she loses her footing on the rock climbing wall and slams into it and bangs her knee up kinda bad. In the afternoon, a student she’s really tried to connect with, whose parents are going through a divorce and who is having a hard time, calls Jess a “fucking bitch.” She has no choice but to call the girl’s parents and let them know, and she feels like she’s just making a bad situation worse. Then, on her way home, she sees a “lost dog” poster, and he looks like he’s maybe still a puppy, and cue the waterworks **.**

That night, Cece and Schmidt are out house-hunting and Winston is over at Aly’s place. Jess hits up the hard stuff — Tylenol PM — to help with the knee pain and the sadness and gets in bed early.

Before she falls into a medicated sleep, her mind goes to how good Nick was at comforting her on days like this one.

Back when they were together, she once arrived home crying from a post-work grocery store trip. When she walked through the door, Nick was off the couch in 2 seconds, running over to her, grabbing her bags and setting them down, holding her face between his hands and saying, “Oh my God, Jess, look at me, _what happened_?”  
  
She told him, between sobs: She found out that day that the district’s budget for after-school programs was being slashed, which meant a lot of the kids and families who relied on them were probably gonna get screwed. And then, on the way from school to the grocery store, she saw a bird hopping on the sidewalk whose left wing looked broken, but by the time she found a parking spot and pulled the car over to try to help, it had disappeared and was probably doomed to be eaten by some predator or something. And _then_ , at the grocery store, the cashier checking her out was a frail, elderly man who looked _way_ too old to have to still be working, let alone for minimum wage, and he didn’t have a wedding ring, so maybe he would just be going home to a lonely, empty apartment, and it just made her so _sad,_ and there was nothing she could _do_ about any of it—

Nick just held her and listened, taking her seriously, letting her bury her head in his chest and cry and get snot all over his henley, telling her to stop apologizing (“it’s OK, Jess, it’s just a shirt”).

“Jess, you feel things so deeply,” he told her as she calmed down, stroking her hair softly with his hand. “If the world were full of people like you, none of these problems would exist. But they do, and it _sucks_ , and you do what you can, but you can’t make everything, everywhere, better for everyone. You’re not Jesus. And I mean, thank God, because then it would be pretty awkward to date ya.”

She smiled a little, for the first time that night, and then, as he rubbed her back, he asked her, “Hey, where do you keep that box? With all the end-of-year messages from your students?”  
  
He read them all out loud to her in her bedroom, one by one, doing different voices for each kid, reminding her of the ways she had made a difference.

She fell asleep on his chest that night, his fingers tangled in her hair.

***

Later that week, Jess is at the front of her summer school classroom, using a laser pointer on a big map of the U.S. as part of a geography lesson.

She looks at Louisiana, and how far it is from California by any objective measure, and tightens her grip on the laser pointer so that she doesn’t accidentally let it go.

***

In week six of Jess’s Summer of Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps, they’re doing a module on Great American Novels in one of her summer school classes. She thought rereading _The Scarlet Letter_ and _To Kill a Mockingbird_ in order to prepare her lesson plans would be a good diversion.

Instead, she keeps thinking about Nick and his writing, wondering how it’s going. He mentioned before leaving that he had gotten a new laptop and was planning to “really get his Julius Pepperwood on” while he was in New Orleans.

Jess eyes her phone. _Maybe I’ll send him a quick text._

Other than a couple of innocuous messages as part of their Apartment 4D text chains, she hasn’t heard from him all summer, and he hasn’t heard from her either.

 _Patience, distance, boundaries, Day,_ she’s told herself. _No meddling. Meddling in other people’s business is part of what got you into this mess in the first place._

_But would a little text message asking her friend what he’s up to with Pepperwood really be the end of the world?_

She thinks about it for a minute, gently reminding herself that she and Nick had always talked about life stuff in person, or sometimes over the phone, never really over text. That in fact, they had mainly used texts playfully for, um, sex communications. (He was a sexy texter. The sexiest texter in the West, she thinks, biting her lip involuntarily as she remembers the night he sent her a message that said “Roof. Now. Wear your robe and nothing else” and she obeyed. The anticipation as she climbed up the stairwell was nearly as hot as what happened next, which involved a lounge chair and her hands tied behind her back with the soft belt of her robe.)

Jess sighs.

She’s afraid that whatever she sends now _(Hey, Miller. How are Pepperwood’s private investigations going?_ or _How’s it going with getting your Pepperwood on?_ ) would come across as a double entendre, in part because she’d want it to.

She resists, moves her phone out of sight, and tries to focus on Hester Prynne.

***

One Thursday night seven weeks in to Jess’s Summer of Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps, her sculpting instructor welcomes a special guest to class: A male model — handsome in a 90s-boy-band kind of way, in his late twenties, probably doing this to pick up some extra cash.

“Today,” the instructor says dramatically, “we will focus on the torso, thought by many to be the most sensual of body parts.”

Jess has to stifle a giggle ( _the torso? really?!_ ); she looks around and sees that no one else is laughing.

When she signed up, she thought the class would be more about, like, sculpting bunnies and making vases and mugs? But nope, their instructor, who wears flowy clothes and speaks with what Jess is pretty sure is a fake British accent and says things like “let the clay speak,” has had them sculpting what she calls “the stuff of life”: a bird, a face, a hand, and now, apparently, a torso.

The torso’s owner is on a little platform at the front of the classroom, stripped down to his boxer briefs (which, Jess thinks, doesn’t really seem… necessary?), posing like he thinks he’s David modeling for Michelangelo.

As she’s working on replicating what the instructor keeps calling “our guest’s middle third,” Jess notices that the model keeps making eye contact with her.

As the class is wrapping up and she’s over at the sink washing her hands, he comes over to talk to her. It’s flattering and she takes his number politely, with far more smoothness than she’d be capable of if she were actually interested in calling him.

He’s good-looking and seems nice, if a little into himself. He appears to have a prize hog. He’ll make some other girl very happy.

By the time she gets home to the loft, she’s forgotten his name.

***  
  
Around eight weeks after Nick left Los Angeles for New Orleans and Reagan, Jess’s students are taking a U.S. state capitols quiz at their desks and she’s sitting at hers, sipping from her reusable water bottle. ( _With all that rock climbing, mama’s gotta stay hydrated!_ , she thinks to herself. _What’s that rhyme?_ _8 cups a day keeps the doctor away? Or is it madness at bay? Hoo boy, Day. Keep it together._ )

That’s when her phone buzzes.

It’s Nick, on their Apartment 4D group text chain:

_Hey, I’m coming back from New Orleans a few weeks early. Flight gets in tomorrow night._

Jessica Day does a legit spit-take, water flying all over the stack of papers on her desk, droplets landing on the screen of her phone. A couple of her students look up at her like she’s gone bananas.

“Um, carry on, kids! Everything’s cool!” she says as she leaps up to grab paper towels and blot up the mess, her voice unnaturally high-pitched.

Her stomach feels like she’s on a Ferris wheel that’s not regularly inspected and is making an abnormally fast descent, and her mind is swirling with an interconnected jumble of thoughts:

 _Oh my God, Nick is coming back early — does this mean he and Reagan are over? It certainly can’t be a_ good _sign in terms of their relationship, right? Oh my God, I can’t get my hopes up unless I know for sure — and even if it’s true and they’re done and I can tell him how I feel, I have no clue how he’ll react — and oh my God, I don’t even know_ how _I’m going to tell him how I feel! The plan! I’m still in phase one! There were still four weeks left for me to come up with something exactly right!_

But somewhere inside her, in addition to the panic, there is something else, a voice still and sure and clear:

_Oh my God. Thank God. He’s coming back. I get to see Nick tomorrow. Finally._

Somehow, by some miracle, that is the voice she focuses on, the one that helps her put one foot in front of another and do what needs to happen next: respond to him.

There is so much she wants to ask and say, but not over text, not like this. So she types up something that is simple and supportive, appropriately but not overly inquisitive, a text a friend would send a friend:

_Sounds good, Miller! Is everything ok?_

Her phone buzzes in her hand almost immediately with his reply:

_Yep. See ya soon, Day._

_***_

It’s been two months instead of three.

Her whole grand strategy for Eventually Discerning The Right Nick-Related Next Steps hasn’t even reached the flow-charts and notecards stage that’s typically central to Successful Jessica Day Plan-Making.

But as she moves through the next 24 hours, she feels weirdly _ready_.

She doesn’t know exactly what’s happened with Reagan (“Nick’s being _real_ tight-lipped about this whole thing,” Schmidt groused that morning), or exactly how she’s going to navigate her first conversation with Nick once he walks back through the door of Apartment 4D, or exactly what she’s going to do in a doomsday scenario where he doesn’t feel the same way.

( _Please, please feel the same way_.)

But she knows exactly who she is, and who Nick is, and that she loves him.

It’s enough of a place to start.

***

The night Nick is due to return, Jess is alone in the loft, partly by benevolent fate (Winston is working an overnight 8-to-4 shift) and partly by design (Cece convinced Schmidt that the two of them really, really needed to go see the new Michael Keaton movie immediately).

“I love you. You’ve got this, babe,” she said to Jess quietly, squeezing her hand, before walking out the door.

Jess is sitting on the couch, wearing a green-and-white zigzag dress that Nick once told her “looks great on ya.”

She hears the ding of the elevator and then the sound of someone at the door.

Her breath catching in her throat, hope surging wild in her belly, she thinks:

_Maybe that’s Nick._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who encouraged me to stick with this story and convinced me to make it a three-parter. I hope my attempt to channel Jess navigating this Nick-less summer felt right and rang true. (I know it's a bit long, but hopefully it's in character for Jess's inner monologue throughout the summer to be more verbose than Nick's!)  
>    
>  I’d love to know what you thought of chapter two! Chapter three, Reunion, is now in progress.
> 
> I’m so grateful for all of the kind and thoughtful comments on the first chapter of this story. @[dreamsofsleep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsOfSleep/pseuds/DreamsOfSleep), thank you for the suggestion to explore Jess making peace with her complexities in chapter two. @DirtyJDrDayTheToiletSister, I hope you enjoy the Nick-isms in this chapter, too - I had fun coming up with them! Some elements of the writing style in this chapter were influenced by [this gorgeous fic](https://falseeeyelashes.livejournal.com/324581.html), and the idea of a possessive Nick Miller fucking Jess in his office at the bar in such a way that everyone else at the bar knows exactly what he’s doing to her was inspired in part by something Nick says to Jess in [chapter three of this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24004516/chapters/57746530#workskin) by @Come_back_to_earth1191720.
> 
> I’ve included links to some reference moments from the show throughout, but here they are all in one place:  
>    
>  \- [The Look](https://energy-into-tomatoes-new-girl.tumblr.com/post/644140419538632704/stumbled-across-this-photo-and-im-pretty-sure-i)
> 
> \- [The Eyelash](https://mrsevanpeters.tumblr.com/post/642693650939248640/ive-never-wanted-to-be-zooey-deschanel-more-in-my)
> 
> \- [The Feelings Stick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEh9z48RClk)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading & potentially sharing feedback!

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this fic and are interested to share it, here's [a Tumblr post](https://energy-into-tomatoes-new-girl.tumblr.com/post/645471230225465344/18932-miles) to potentially reblog. Thank you so much!


End file.
